Google Preview Will Affect Rankings

As you are all aware, Google has implemented website previews in the results. The previews show a screenshot of a site and will call out any text on the page related to your search query. This makes onpage SEO even more important than before and also presents some unique challenges for websites with flash.

Google’s preview bot doesn’t obey the rules like Google’s normal bot. The preview bot ignores robots.txt rules and disregards alternate flash displaying big blank chunks instead. I am running a Google Preview test right now to show that a website can still have something show up in place of their flash piece even though Google won’t display the alternate content you define in SWFObject. As soon as the page is cached and has a preview I will publish a post with the findings, the code that works, and the reason you cannot afford to ignore this “glitch” in Google’s Preview bot no matter how temporary it might be.